Wine · 3.3

Dry, off-dry, sweet: what the words are doing

Defined in law in some places and not in others, and on a sparkling bottle they run backwards: dry is sweeter than brut.

For a practical operations perspective on coordinating people and schedules, Monitask offers a concise companion guide.

Dry, off-dry and sweet describe how much sugar is left in a wine after fermentation. Whether those words mean anything precise depends entirely on where the bottle was labelled.

The numbers behind them

Residual sugar is measured in grams per litre. Broadly, under about four grams reads as dry, four to twelve as off-dry, twelve to forty-five as medium, and anything above that as sweet.

In the European Union those bands are defined in law and a producer may only use the word if the wine falls inside them. In the United States the terms are not regulated for still wine at all, so one producer's dry is another's off-dry and neither is doing anything improper.

Why the number is not the sensation

Sweetness is perceived against acidity. A wine with twenty grams of sugar and high acid tastes drier than one with twelve grams and low acid, because the acid is cancelling part of the impression.

Tannin does the same in the other direction, and alcohol adds a warmth that reads as richness. So four separate components decide what a mouthful seems to contain, and the label reports at most one of them.

Fruity is not sweet

The commonest confusion at any tasting table. An aroma of ripe fruit suggests sweetness before the wine reaches the tongue, and a bone-dry wine full of fruit character will be described as sweet by people who would reject actual sugar.

Glycerol, produced during fermentation, adds a further impression of roundness without contributing sugar. A wine can be dry, taste rich, and smell sweet, all at once, honestly.

The one place the words are defined, and reversed

For sparkling wine the terms are regulated and they run counter to intuition. Brut nature is the driest, then extra brut, then brut. After that comes extra dry, which is sweeter than brut, then dry, which is sweeter still, then demi-sec, then doux.

A sparkling wine labelled dry is sweeter than one labelled brut. The scale is a historical accident and it catches people who have every reason to expect otherwise.

Why that matters for chocolate

The entry on sparkling wine and chocolate is about a pairing that usually fails, and this is the reason it sometimes does not. A demi-sec has enough sugar to satisfy the sugar rule where a brut has nothing like enough.

Anybody who tried sparkling wine with chocolate once, hated it, and concluded the pairing is impossible was almost certainly holding a brut.

Asking at a table

Do not ask whether a wine is sweet. The answer comes back on the pourer's scale, which may not be yours, and the word does most of its work as reassurance.

Ask where it sits between the driest and the sweetest thing on their table. That is a comparison rather than an adjective, it is a question the person can answer exactly, and it gives you a position on a scale you can then taste against.

The temperature confound

Warmth increases the perception of sweetness and cold reduces it, as the entry on temperature explains. The same bottle poured at ten degrees and at eighteen produces two different answers to the question of whether it is sweet.

Late in a warm evening, everything on a tasting floor reads sweeter than it did at the start, and that is the room rather than the wine.

What to do with all this

Treat the word on the label as an approximate signal, taste before deciding, and remember that your judgement is being made against whatever you tasted immediately before.

For pairing purposes only one question matters, and it is the sugar rule: is this wine at least as sweet as the thing I am going to eat with it. That is answerable by tasting the two together and by nothing else.

The short version

The words are defined in some places and not in others, the number behind them is only part of the sensation, and on a sparkling bottle they run backwards.

Where sweetness is the point

Some of the most valued wines in the world are sweet by design: late-harvest wines, wines made from grapes left to freeze, and wines affected by a mould that concentrates the juice. None of them is considered a lesser thing by anybody who drinks them.

Worth remembering when the word sweet is being used dismissively at a table, and worth remembering here because those are the wines that work best with chocolate.

The band most people cannot name

Off-dry is the useful category and the one nobody reaches for. A wine with a small amount of sugar reads as fruity rather than sweet, holds up against food that has sugar in it, and does not tire the palate the way a genuinely sweet wine does over an evening.

For a room full of chocolate, it is arguably the most useful style present, and it is the one least likely to be described accurately on a label.

One more confound

Carbon dioxide raises perceived acidity, so a sparkling wine reads drier than a still wine with the same sugar. Another reason the sparkling scale had to be defined separately, and another reason a still wine and a sparkling one cannot be compared by their labels.

Where to start if you dislike sweet wine

With something off-dry rather than with something dry. The objection most people have is to the cloying end of the scale, not to the presence of sugar, and the band between the two is where the useful wines for this subject live.

Also in this part

• 1.1

  Why a dry red and a sweet chocolate fight

  The wine must be at least as sweet as the food. Everything else in this entry is a qualification of that sentence.

  Read it →
• 1.2

  Tannin and fat: what happens in the mouth

  Astringency is not a flavour. You are noticing the absence of lubrication that was there a moment ago.

  Read it →

For further context, see TTB anatomy of a wine label.